These days Yoz Grahame works for 18F, a USA Government website that bills itself as : “Building the 21st century digital government“. However in a former virtual life Yoz worked for Linden Lab, unsurprisingly he was known as Yoz Linden. However he has also long been harbouring a secret, that may or may not have been closely guarded.
Yoz it seems was involved in keeping a alive a forum that had a life of its own, as reported by Kotaku : The Secret Douglas Adams RPG That People Have Been Playing for 15 Years. The RPG itself, known as Starship Titanic, is, claims the Kotaku article, pretty unplayable these days. The book of the same name was not written by Douglas Adams, it was instead penned by Terry Jones, but the forum? That’s where Yoz comes into play.
Yoz worked for The Digital Village and as part of his work on the website he created an employee forum, that wasn’t just open to employees. Cryptic clues were provided as to the existence of this forum. However Yoz forgot all about it, for around six months, and then decided to take a peek :
Visitors to the forum had created fictional employees and passengers on the Starship Titanic and begun role playing as them. Someone would make up an implausible, Adams-esque scenario, and everyone else would react to it in character, resulting in some enormously complex storylines and in-jokes that developed and diversified over years. And this strange fictional world had appeared entirely spontaneously, without any input from Douglas Adams or The Digital Village. Indeed, Yoz was as surprised as anyone when he stumbled across it: “It was like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera,” he says.
The beauty of user generated content, even in forum form appears to have been a sight to behold.
There’s an interesting lesson in communities in the Kotaku article and it’s one that often gets missed. The Starship Titanic forum had a small but creative community that was quite close knit. This wasn’t a place that attracted trolls and people making rogue comments were few and far between. This is important in terms of building a community, people feel more attached if they are being heard and feel welcome.
However there’s another interesting aspect to community spirit, the challenge of change. When Yoz decided it was time to spruce up the forum and add new features, he probably felt they would be welcomed with open arms. The original forum had been basic, very basic. Yoz decided to add BBCode so that people could format text, use bold, underline, italic etc. The results? Hardly anybody used those features. Quite possibly because they felt more comfortable with what had been the traditional way of creating content. There was no need to use bold or italics to emphasise points, the community had worked out how to make their points in plain text.
Yoz comments about this in the article and it’s a point that a lot of people simply don’t get when trying to manage communities :
Communities grow into the shape that they’re given… but they almost never work out the way you think they will.
This will continue to be an issue for communities, especially where user generated content is concerned, the main predictable factor is that the journey of a community will be unpredictable.
However another point about communities is that they can endure great hardship and fight against adversity, this came to a head in the early 2000’s when The Digital Village came to the end of the road. Carolyn Wilborn, who was active on the forum wrote an impassioned email to Yoz :
Many, and maybe most, people watch TV to relax. They want to be told a story. All of this is well and good, but in my experience with the Forum, I saw something far more interesting. While the producers and programmers work to find a way for us to play with their creations, we are busy building our own. The StarStruct Employee Forum is interactive fiction. We didn’t sit around and discuss what the game will be like or how we liked the book. We created characters, we put them on the ship, we invented storylines and conflicts, and we wrote a kind of story. It was often chaotic and frustrating, but it was (is) great. We evolved and matured as characters. We listened to the things others said they were doing and reacted or ignored them. We were invaded, we fought wars, we marketed products, we argued, we pretended to eat and to party. Maybe every story has to end, but I hope not.
Many a community on the edge of the precipice have people who will have similar feelings. Yoz became the great saviour, he decided to host the forum itself.
The website for Starship Titanic still exists today, but that’s a far newer version than the original one. As for the original one, it does indeed appear to still be around, but you’ll have to look a little harder to find it.
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